“Nope,” disagreed her husband, shaking his head.  “Don’t you take Lois; she wouldn’t talk confiding to Lois, the way she would to you.  You’ve got a way with you, Abby.  I’ll bet you could coax a bird off a bush as easy as pie, if you was a mind to.”

Mrs. Daggett’s big body shook with soft laughter.  She beamed rosily on her husband.

“How you do go on, Henry!” she protested.  “But I ain’t going to coax Lydia Orr off no bush she’s set her heart on.  She’s got the sweetest face, papa; an’ I know, without anybody telling me, whatever she does or wants to do is all right.”

Mr. Daggett had by now invested his portly person in a clean linen coat, bearing on its front the shining mark of Mrs. Daggett’s careful iron.

“Same here, Abby,” he said kindly:  “whatever you do, Abby, suits me all right.”

The worthy couple parted for the morning:  Mr. Daggett for the scene of his activities in the post office and store; Mrs. Daggett to set her house to rights and prepare for the noon meal, when her Henry liked to “eat hearty of good, nourishing victuals,” after his light repast of the morning.

“Guess I’ll wear my striped muslin,” said Mrs. Daggett to herself happily.  “Ain’t it lucky it’s all clean an’ fresh?  ’Twill be so cool to wear out buggy-ridin’.”

Mrs. Daggett was always finding occasion for thus reminding herself of her astonishing good fortune.  She had formed the habit of talking aloud to herself as she worked about the house and garden.

“’Tain’t near as lonesome, when you can hear the sound of a voice—­if it is only your own,” she apologized, when rebuked for the practice by her friend Mrs. Maria Dodge.  “Mebbe it does sound kind of crazy—­ You say lunatics does it constant—­but, I don’t know, Maria, I’ve a kind of a notion there’s them that hears, even if you can’t see ’em.  And mebbe they answer, too—­in your thought-ear.”

“You want to be careful, Abby,” warned Mrs. Dodge, shaking her head.  “It makes the chills go up and down my back to hear you talk like that; and they don’t allow no such doctrines in the church.”

“The Apostle Paul allowed ’em,” Mrs. Daggett pointed out, “so did the Psalmist.  You read your Bible, Maria, with that in mind, and you’ll see.”

In the spacious, sunlighted chamber of her soul, devoted to the memory of her two daughters who had died in early childhood, Mrs. Daggett sometimes permitted herself to picture Nellie and Minnie, grown to angelic girlhood, and keeping her company about her lonely household tasks in the intervals not necessarily devoted to harp playing in the Celestial City.  She laughed softly to herself as she filled two pies with sliced sour apples and dusted them plentifully with spice and sugar.

“I’d admire to see papa argufying with that sweet girl,” she observed to the surrounding silence.  “Papa certainly is set on having his own way.  Guess bin’ alone here with me so constant, he’s got kind of willful.  But it don’t bother me any; ain’t that lucky?”